EarwigBot is a Python robot that edits Wikipedia and interacts with people over IRC.

History

Development began, based on the Pywikipedia framework, in early 2009. Approval for its fist task, a copyright violation detector, was carried out in May, and the bot has been running consistently ever since (with the exception of Jan/Feb 2011). It currently handles several ongoing tasks, ranging from statistics generation to category cleanup, and on-demand tasks such as WikiProject template tagging. Since it started running, the bot has made over 50,000 edits.

A project to rewrite it from scratch began in early April 2011, thus moving away from the Pywikipedia framework and allowing for less overall code, better integration between bot parts, and easier maintenance.

Installation

This package contains the core earwigbot, abstracted enough that it should be usable and customizable by anyone running a bot on a MediaWiki site. Since it’s component-based, the IRC components can be disabled if desired. IRC commands and bot tasks specific to my instance of EarwigBot are available from the package earwigbot-plugins.

Latest release (v0.1)

EarwigBot is available from the Python Package Index, so you can install the latest release with pip install earwigbot (get pip).

You can also install it from source directly:

curl -Lo earwigbot.tgz "https://github.com/earwig/earwigbot/tarball/v0.1"
tar -xf earwigbot.tgz
cd earwig-earwigbot-*
python setup.py install  # may require root, or use --user switch to install locally
cd ..
rm -r earwigbot.tgz earwig-earwigbot-*

Development version

You can install the development version of the bot from git, probably on the develop branch which contains (usually) working code. master contains the latest release. EarwigBot uses git flow, so you’re free to browse by tags or by new features (feature/* branches).

git clone git://github.com/earwig/earwigbot.git earwigbot
cd earwigbot
python setup.py develop  # may require root, or use --user switch to install locally

Setup

It’s recommended to run the bot’s unit tests before installing. Run python -m unittest discover tests from the project’s root directory.

Note: some unit tests require an internet connection.

Customizing

Hacking